The Meaning of Life: A Mixed-Media Art Journal Page by Guest Artist Kate Crane

Today’s project is by Guest Artist Kate Crane. Please give a warm welcome to her and enjoy her amazing project.

As a fairly prolific and long-term art journaler, I am always looking for new ideas to try out in my journals. However, there are recurring and repeating features that always seem to appear – bright colours, lots and lots of layers, stenciling and stamping!

Recently I have been playing with repeating images. We all like a bit of familiarity and therefore repetition can be soothing and relaxing. It’s also a great way to use a small stamped image on a larger page, an image that would usually get lost on a larger scale page.

Materials:

• Acrylic paints: Turquoise, Lime Green, Hot Pink, White, Black
• White Signo Uniball pen
• Stencil (I used Dotted Flowers by Dylusions)
• Junk for stamping – old bottle lids and credit cards
• ‘Bunny Boy’ by Stampotique Originals

Instructions:

1. Begin by painting white acrylic paint onto the page, and then brush touches of turquoise paint into the white while it is still wet allowing the turquoise to blend into areas of light and dark.
2. When this is reasonably dry, add areas of lime green in roughly blended patches.
3. Randomly sponge both of these colours through a stencil all over the background. You can also stamp these colours using paint on any of your background stamps (just make sure you wipe it off straight away!) As long as you stick to these colours you can keep going with the layers and your background will look nicely busy but not too cluttered.
4. Scrape a little black around the edges with a palette knife, and add some circles by using an old bottle lid dipped into paint. If you add a little water to the paint you can also add a few black splats with a fine paintbrush. I love adding black, it makes the other colours pop!
5. Now it’s time to add a contrast colour with a little more junk stamping. I chose to add a hot pink because I had already coloured my stamped images and I wanted to choose a colour that was featured on those.
6. Doodling is a lovely way to add some definition to a background and I especially like adding detail with a white Signo Uniball pen. I most often doodle around shapes that I already created with stenciling and stamping.
7. Stamp your chosen image four times, colour and cut out. Cut one image in half down the centre. Uneven numbers usually work best as a repeating image, and even though I stamped four here I cut one in half so the eye sees five.
8. Once the images are glued to the page it helps to ground them with a bit of stitching, or maybe just a strip of Washi tape or even a strip of vintage text.
9. Finally add a quote or some journaling. I typed and added a quote that I stumbled upon on Pinterest, I just love the simplicity of this quote and it really reminds me not to overthink things!  A few scribbled circles on some old text help to bring everything together on the page.

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.” — Alan Wilson Watts

Stampington & Company wants to thank our Guest Artist Kate Crane for her post and for the amazing artwork that is featured here. Kate Crane has been published in Somerset Studio Gallery, Somerset Apprentice, Art Journaling, HandCrafted, The Stampers’ Sampler, Somerset Studio, and Artful Blogging.